The Sexton 5

No one wants to arrive at the hospital too early – or risk giving birth in the car. To figure out if the contractions you are feeling are the real thing, ask yourself the following questions. I wish people working with birthing women would start thinking more about the power of their words. Since contractions often last under a minute, it’s important to be able to time them to the second.

As your labour gets going, your contractions will usually get stronger, longer and closer together. The interval between contractions becomes shorter than that of previous stages. Contractions are extremely common in speech and fiction, quite common in magazines and newspapers, and less common in academic journals.

Some women sail through labor contractions not even knowing if they are even in labor, and others have the complete opposite experience. At exactly 41 weeks (Thursday) my water broke around 2 pm and I started having contractions right away. The duration of contractions may be 30-45 seconds and the interval between them – about 5 minutes.

I ended up on partial bedrest and did make it to 37.5 weeks at delivery but it’s important to check with your doctor if you have them with any regularity. Contractions during the third stage of labour detach the placenta so that it can be pushed out. Because some possessives and contractions sound alike (you’re/your, they’re/their, it’s/its), you have to be very careful not to confuse these words (see the homonyms section below).

I also made the same experience during my two births: contractions until the end not something you could call birthcontractions” – lasting 10-15 seconds at the most, but giving me almost no break coming every minute or even less. Learning they lied weeks after his death, we started researching furiously about breech birth.